Walking in the sewers with sewage and foul smell, the girls seemed a little relieved.

Far from being a safe place, Lüddes' sewers are full of sin and violence, and all the sins of the world can be found everywhere in this labyrinthine underground kingdom, but the beauty of human nature is hard to find. It is home to homeless people, frustrated people, loan sharks, swindlers, drunkards, pickpockets, robbers, prostitutes, intelligence dealers, contraband smugglers, intelligence workers...... It seems that all the bad pus that has been spat on by the world has flowed into the sewers of Lüdders, and it is impossible for any law-abiding citizen to live more than half an hour after stepping into this sinful place.

For two good-looking young girls, they shouldn't have set foot here.

But for them with their special status, the huge Lüders is one of the few places where they can feel a little reassured, and only here will the distrust, suspicion and the feeling of being watched in the air of Lüdes be a little thinner.

After the founding of the empire, all kinds of people who could not get along in Lüdes poured into the sewers, turning it into a huge slum, a hotbed and paradise for criminals. The addition of various intelligence traffickers and agents from various countries has made the place even more chaotic. Fighting with weapons is commonplace, putting sacks and beating sticks is a daily routine, and shootouts will break out anytime and anywhere. In order to obtain some safe space in this sinful land, people living in sewers, from individuals, families to organizations, have begun to dig tunnels and basements, and various underground facilities are overlapped on top of each other, and their complexity is even greater than that of termite ant colonies, and even the Imperial engineers who originally built the sewer system do not dare to enter this place easily, and once lost, they are not necessarily more hungry and thirsty than the humans they look down upon.

It is precisely in note of this that all kinds of lightless organizations have set up bases here to avoid the omnipresent eyes of the Empire.

Remove the haphazard piles of junk—old couches that smell musty, cabbage, gutter smells, carpentry tools, filthy carpets, and behind them is a mossy stone wall. "Mockingbird" reached out and fumbled for a while, pulling a rusty hook on the wall, and the whole wall cracked in the middle with a click.

The entire wall was painstakingly painted with special fuel by art teachers and students at the former national college (ordinary pigments fade easily in humid environments), and even on the ground, it is difficult to distinguish from real stone walls, let alone dimly lit sewers. In order to enhance the camouflage effect, a pile of debris was piled up. If it weren't for the "robin" leading the way, "Nightingale" would never have imagined that there would be a secret passage hidden here.

Closing the wooden door, the "robin" pulls a few thin lines on the side of the wooden door, and the sound of objects moving and rubbing outside the door can be heard. It turns out that the debris outside is connected by a thin wire, and after entering the passage and closing the door, you can pull the thin wire to return the debris to its place and restore its camouflage.

After a winding path, "Nightingale" finally came to a small room where a middle-aged man was waiting for her.

"Welcome to Lüders, Comrade 'Nightingale'. ”

The middle-aged man reached out and held the girl's left hand.

"I am the 'owl', the head of the Lüdes branch. ”

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Comrade Owl. I'm sorry that the right hand is not very convenient. ”

In the dim light, "Nightingale" looked at who was directly responsible for his operation.

This is a very ordinary person from appearance to dress, he may be an uncle who is a school janitor, he may be the owner of a commissary, anyway, he is the kind of public face that can no longer be found when thrown into the pile. But there were two things that impressed the Nightingale.

One is that he is fluent in speech and movements, and is obviously highly educated;

The second is that his left hand is not only powerful, but also has a gun cocoon formed by holding the gun for a long time;

Hands freed, and the three of them took their seats at the folding table in the center of the room.

"It's been a good ride, isn't it?"

"It's okay luck, if it's too late, I'll be blocked by the chain dogs. ”

The "robin" followed the contact mark left by the "Nightingale" to the door, and helped the "Nightingale" erase all kinds of traces, even the traces of the use of Mana, and when they left less than half an hour, the senior detective of the Imperial Social Order Bureau arrived, and the two sides almost collided.

"Our opponent is not simple, the comrades who stayed at the scene reported that the Social Security Bureau not only dispatched veteran case-handling experts this time, but also took out the cutting-edge weapons that specialize in hunting magicians. ”

"Owl" poured a glass of water, handed it to "Nightingale", and took out another cup.

"In the time you arrived, three mages belonging to different organizations had been hunted. ”

#####################

"What an uncomfortable guy. ”

The forensic doctor, Eisler, shook his head, put on his surgical gloves, and carefully looked at the cold corpse.

The deceased was a handsome twenty-year-old man, still young, handsome, and sentimental even after his death, but he may have been confronted with something so horrible that the handsome face was so distorted that it was almost unrecognizable. Even coroners and medical examiners, who are accustomed to seeing corpses, feel some palpitations and even some sympathy for the deceased.

What exactly happened to him and what happened to him?

Casting your gaze on the part below the neck of the deceased may give the answer.

Dishcloth?

Ground meat?

Marmalade?

Meat?

It could be any mixture of red and white, but it was impossible to believe it was a human body.

The medical examiners have seen many horrible corpses, from the masterpieces of murderers, to the unlucky ones who fell into machines, and the poor ghosts who drowned and were swept under the boat and almost chopped into pieces of meat by the propellers. But the corpse in front of me ...... Cuts, scalds, frostbite, crushing injuries, blunt force blows, electrical injuries, corrosion injuries, ......

The assailant was definitely a sadist, so obsessed with the feeling of torturing others that he used every method he knew of to hurt someone on this man, and perhaps even went out of his way to film the whole process with audio and video equipment, and took something from the victim as a souvenir.

However, the perpetrators of the atrocities are all around them, neither powerful butcher-like men nor neurotic men, but a lovely girl.

"In the afternoon of 1553, it was confirmed that a magician had been ruled out, the head was well preserved, and the forensic doctor was collecting evidence. ”

Epenny reported calmly, with a quiet and charming smile on her face, if it weren't for the blood on her face, clothes, and hands, the girl bathed in the setting sun would have been a beautiful picture.

It may be a bloody relationship, or it may be the fear and disgust from the bottom of her heart after witnessing how Epenny "dismantled" the recalcitrant magician, and Epenny is surrounded only by Mach.

"So, is this guy the one we're looking for?"

Mach leaned against the car door and asked coldly. As he spoke, a group of white coats and stretchers covered with white sheets ran to the refrigerated truck not far away.

"The similarity of the Mana waveform is less than 5%. ”

"Then he's really unlucky. ”

Maher threw the blanket on Epenny's head, pulled the door hard, and said in a commanding tone:

"Go in and clean yourself – inside and out. ”

"Your Excellency, you can do it anytime, anywhere—"

"It's an order. ”

"Yes. ”

Neither angry nor stunned by the vicious order, Epenny obediently slipped into the sports car, made it on the blanketed seat, and raised the one-way reflective glass. And then, like a knight taking off his helmet -

Took off his head.

#######################

"'Siren' - This is a special specification 'Legion' model for hunting magicians. In order to distinguish it from the code name of the 'Legion', 'Harpy', such a code name was used, which is actually what it is. ”

In ancient mythology, there are two kinds of sirens, one is a mermaid with a human body and a fishtail, and the other is a harpy with a human face and a bird's body. In layman's terms, the siren and the muse lost to the goddess of music and art in the Greek Voice Ring, and as a result, they were plucked and turned into a mermaid (people need money to sing, but you sing badly...... ）。 However, in most Greek mythology, the sirens are actually the same human-faced bird-like figures as the harpys, and the sirens often do the same job as the harpys, that is, to guide the souls of the dead to the underworld, and to act as messengers between this and the next.

Using these two call signs to name the killing machine that carries the souls of the dead can be said to be apt, or it can be said to be a bad taste.

"I won't say much about the 'Harpy,' because you who participated in guerrilla warfare know better than anyone else. I'm talking about the 'sirens' here. Perhaps many people think that it is a milder thing than a 'harpy' because of mythology. Actually, that thing is much more vicious than 'Harpy'. ”

The middle-aged man frowned, as if to say something very disgusting.

"The sirens are designed to hunt magicians. ”

The tone of the "nightingale" is steady, as if discussing wild birds, not their own natural predators.

"That's right, it's a dedicated killing weapon designed to find mages hiding among ordinary people, drive them into a corner, and kill them, and since they were put in, several organizations of mages have been killed. ”

"The question is why those things can accurately locate the magician, and if I don't master this, it will be difficult for me to carry out future actions. ”

"That'......"

The middle-aged man, who had been crisp and sharp, snorted for a while, and finally showed an expression that was almost a wry smile.

"Comrade Nightingale, you should know that the core of the 'legion' is to replicate the structure of the human brain. ”

"Yes. They act like scavengers, searching for and dissecting the heads of corpses. ”

"By replicating the brain makeup of the dead, the 'Legion' gained the wisdom to hunt humans. But in the final analysis, it is just a highly intelligent program, and I don't understand the so-called 'feeling' and 'sensibility'. As killing machines, they don't need to master this. But magic is both a rigorous theory and a miracle rooted in people's sensibilities about Mana. With cutting-edge technology alone, it may not be possible to spot a magician hiding in the crowd who is no different from an ordinary person. The only way to find out the hidden magician is to rely on another magician with a keen sense to grasp the clues by feeling the flow and changes of Mana. ”

"That's true. ”

Until the Great War, the best weapon against one mage must have been another. Of course, you can also commit to a professional team of affiliates, or simply drive the soldiers to crush each other with numbers. But since then, the cost of investment is almost the same as that of training a magician.

The Great War, especially the advent and mass production of guns, completely changed the situation.

Whether it's a sniper's precise shot, terrifying fire coverage, or even mines that don't have a murderous aura and don't interfere with Mana's flow, it's enough to wipe out a dozen mages, but the cost of investing in them is much lower than training a dozen mages, let alone the benefits.

In terms of efficiency improvement, it is the expertise of science and technology.

However, even if the Imperial Defense Force could scatter distracting particles all over the sky, and the aircraft and chariot cannons would press Charlemagne's troops to the ground and rub them in various positions, there would still be one thing that would be difficult to do.

That is to distinguish a magician from an ordinary person.

It was purely sensual territory, and even if the Empire captured a bunch of magicians, cut open their brains and compared them with the brains of ordinary people, studied the characteristics of magicians' brains, and wrote several cabinets of formulas, the progress made would still be limited.

Eventually, they discovered that since magicians could sense other magicians, they could get the most effective magician-killing machines by taking out the magician's brain, specially processing it, and putting it into a human container. The concrete result of this crazy idea is the 'siren', a humanoid killing machine used to slaughter mages. ”

The fists placed on the table clenched hard, and the face of the "owl" was full of indignation and disgust.

.。 m.